I'm glad that they included this.
I get that Javascript is required to make certain sites work the way they do, but I'm appalled by the number of sites that require Javascript just to display static text.
Google themselves are guilty of this. Google Groups is (for the most part) just an archive of email mailing lists, but try reading a thread on Google Groups with Javascript disabled![0]
There are very few sites that cannot gracefully downgrade to at least some degree, and there are very good reasons for doing so. A major one is that AJAX-heavy sites tend not to perform well on slow connections[1] (again, assuming essentially static content here). If you want your users to be able to access your site on-the-go, graceful degradation is your friend.
[0] It's especially ironic now that Google Groups is the only place to read many old Usenet archives going back as far as the early 1980s.
[1] Try browsing Twitter on a slow (ie, tethered, or "Amtrak wifi" level connection). For a website that originally originated as a way to send messages over SMS, and is still used that way in other parts of the world, it degrades amazingly poorly over slow connections.